It’s that time again folks. Time to celebrate the fine folks who put their lives on the line to protect this country. So while your kids are home from school today you can–oh, right, Veteran’s Day still has school. Well, regardless, why not gather your kids up (or buddies if you don’t have any kids) and regale them in stories of military exploits. If not your own, then perhaps somebody else’s?
For those of you who might remember, this past July my Great Grandfather died. He was a Veteran of World War II. So this year, instead of just a handful of loose pictures formed into a Photopost, I figured I’d tell you a story he once told me. The story of how he enlisted in the U.S. Army.
You see my Grandfather was never a wealthy man. He worked the family farm and also worked in the mines to make ends meet. One day he went to the bank and deposited his life Savings…$19.
About a week later he was in the store and came upon a realization: He was doing pretty well for himself. He owned a home, he had money in the bank, and he had a family back home. So he decided to buy a newspaper. The front page said something about a big crash, but he didn’t know what kind of vehicle a ‘Stock Market’ was.
That’s right…my Grandfather invested his life savings a week before the stock markets crashed causing the Great Depression to begin. He lost everything he had saved in the crash, all nineteen dollaridoos.
Needless to say he decided that newspapers were bad news, had nothing but bad news in them. So a few years passed and he was working in the mines for a dollar a day and then working the farm to try to feed his family. He heard a rumor that the Army was paying twice that…two dollars a day!
So he drove in town and signed up for a tour of duty with the Army. He was on the bus down to Basic Training when he got into a conversation with a fellow recruit and said why he had joined. He was puzzled by the other recruits response, “Wait…you didn’t hear about what happened in Hawaii?”
“Hawaii? What happened.”
“The Japanese bombed us…we declare war on them in December. We’re at war.”
Now he was a lucky man in that he made it home unscathed. From that point on he decided to keep a little bit better track of the news before making any life decisions.
~RCS
Richard C. Shaffer 